retext-codex-standard

Enforce codeX rules about language: this is a testing tool that automatically runs on English-language content produced by the codeX team to guard against common grammar, sensitivity, and simplicity errors.

Enforcement

• Acronym & term styling, like GeoJSON rather than geoJSON
• Brand styling, like codeX instead of codeX
• Simple language - includes retext-simplify to recommend plain language words
• Sensitive language - includes retext-equality

Installation

Install globally:

npm install -g retext-codex-standard

More typically, this will be included as a devDependency and invoked through the test script.

Configuration

Per-file exceptions can be enabled with comments, using syntax from remark-message-control.

For instance, in the list above where we needed to mention the word geoJSON, the list is preceded by the following comment so that it doesn't trigger a validation error in CI:

<!--codex ignore geojson OpenStreetMap-->

Example

$ retext-codex-standard bad.md
bad.md
  1:19-1:22  warning  OSM is jargon, use OpenStreetMap instead
  1:40-1:46  warning  codex is styled codeX
  2:40-2:47  warning  geoJSON should be styled GeoJSON
  4:50-4:55  warning  `crazy` may be insensitive, use `rude`, `mean`, `disgusting`, `vile`, `person with symptoms of mental illness`, `person with mental illness`, `person with symptoms of a mental disorder`, `person with a mental disorder` instead
Source: http://ncdj.org/style-guide/
 
⚠ 4 warnings

Architecture

Implementation details for the interested, optional reading

This code is built on wooorm/remark the Markdown parser and wooorm/retext the natural language toolkit. These libraries avoid false-positives related to code syntax: we should never flag a spelling error in a URL, for instance. Since codex's documentation also uses Liquid templating tags, this tool also includes a step that removes them before validation.

retext-simplify and retext-equality (the core of wooorm/alex) are used unmodified but with a bunch of loosened restrictions. lib/standard adds codex-specific rules about styling and casing brands and technical jargon.